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AS IT TURNED out, Sexy Beast’s mother had two names. Either would have counted as a correct answer. Her registered name was Champion Monkeysee Monkeydo. Yeah, that’s right, my neurotic little poodle shares the genes of a certifiable champion. Do they give blue ribbons for dribbling pee while prostrating oneself in fawning submission? Her “call name”—what her humans called her, in other words—was Bananas.
The padre knew this. He wrote it all out on his answer sheet. He also knew that I have sober, dignified Sten Jakobsen, of all people, to thank for my decidedly undignified, impossible-to-shake nickname, Death Diva. I must remember to thank him.
Oh, and the original location of Janey's Place? Not Main Street, thank you very much, but a big, apple green food truck, a kind of health-food roach coach that used to make the rounds of businesses too small to have their own cafeterias.
And yeah, it’s understandable that this “original location” slipped my mind, considering I spent about a million hours behind the wheel of that thing way back when, serving up smoked-portobello club sandwiches and creamy carrot-coconut soup to hardworking vegetarians all over western Nassau County.
It’s not my fault, it was a trick question!
Guess who got it right.
And guess whose team won the damn trivia contest. The padre and his nubile cheering section celebrated their triumph with little glasses of sherry and a sedate toast in honor of their worthy adversaries.
Just kidding. They screamed and pounded the table and knocked back booze and hugged and kissed and groped one another so thoroughly I began to suspect Martin didn’t go there for the trivia.
Sophie was less vexed than I’d expected at our loss, distracted as she was by her upcoming meeting with Detective Hernandez. At least she’d lawyered up. Ben and Stevie gave her a lift back to the library, where her car was parked.
As was mine. They offered me a ride, but it was a gorgeous night and I opted to hoof it. I hadn’t gone half a block when Martin jogged up behind me.
“I turned around and you were gone,” he said. His breath was beer-scented, but he was by no means drunk.
I tried not to read too much into that simple statement. Such as: I’ve been watching you all evening and when I saw you were gone, I thought my heart would break in two.
“Where’s your motorcycle?” I asked. “Library?”
He shook his head. “I walked.”
“From the house?” I looked at him. “It’s about two miles from there to the library.”
“I like running into your neighbors and telling them I’m living with you.”
I rolled my eyes, deciding not to let him bait me. It was too lovely a night for even a halfhearted squabble. “Do you tell them Dom’s bunking there too?”
“Nah. He won’t last.”
“Oh, and you will?”
Instead of answering, he nodded toward the corner restaurant we were approaching. “Want to get a table?”
“I already had dinner,” I said.
The restaurant, called Dewatre after its executive chef and owner, Pierre “Swing” Dewatre, featured outdoor seating in the summer. Swing had earned notoriety for serving exotic and endangered animals. Well, that was the rumor anyway, one the animal-rights groups had gotten all worked up over. For what it’s worth, I never noticed any sketchy items on the menu. All I knew was, Swing made a sweet-and-sour brisket that was the most delicious thing I’d ever put in my mouth. If it was in reality sweet-and-sour panda, I didn’t want to know.
“I ate too,” he said, “but you can never have too much dessert. Swing makes a killer tiramisu.”
“Some other time.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
I looked at him and then quickly away, shoring up my defenses against those crystal blue eyes and that deliciously predatory smile. The fact that the padre clearly knew how sexy he was should have been a major turn-off for a mature, sensible woman like me, but what can I tell you? Something about this guy turned me into a dopey, weak-kneed teenager.
“So what makes you think Dom’s going to move out soon?” I asked. “Didn’t he say he’d stay as long as you did?”
“He has a lot on his plate,” Martin said.
“What, like running the Janey’s Place intergalactic empire?”
“He has two families to take care of.”
Right. Dom’s two exes and their children. His children.
What’s that you say? That you’ve had enough of me whining about how my biological clock is swiftly running down and it might already be too late? Okay, I won’t bring it up again if you don’t.
Unless I, you know, forget.
Martin continued, “And by ‘take care of’—”
“I know.” I held up my hand to silence him. “Dom gives his exes more than the agreed-upon financial support and has joint custody of all the kids and he fixes stuff around their houses and they let him pop in all the time without calling and they all get along so splendidly it makes me want to puke.”
Martin answered this little tirade with silence as we crossed the street and turned another corner. When I could no longer stand it, I barked, “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Don’t make me hurt you, Padre.”
“It doesn’t take a shrink to see you’re still hung up on your ex,” he said. “Is that what a guy has to do to ensure your everlasting devotion? Turn himself into Johnny Appleseed and turn all his exes into BFFs?”
I walked faster. Martin kept pace. “You make it sound all sister-wife. It’s nothing like that. And Johnny Appleseed? The guy has three kids, not thirty.”
“That you know of.”
“You can shut up now.”
He did, much to my annoyance. When we reached the library, he walked me to my car in the dark parking lot.
“I suppose you’re expecting a ride home?” I said.
He slipped past me and got in behind the wheel. “I’ll drive. You’ve been drinking.”
“I had one beer!”
“Me too, but I weigh more. Higher tolerance.”
I doubted that. Not that he had a higher tolerance, but that he’d stopped at one. But I was in no mood to argue. I slid into the passenger side of my new/old Mazda. He lowered the windows, turned off the A/C, and headed for Main Street.
After a few blocks, he took the opposite turn from the one that would take us to my house. Why was I not surprised? “Okay, where are we going?” I asked.
“It’s early. You don’t really want to go home, do you?”
“It’s nearly midnight,” I said. “And yeah, I’m a boring old broad and I want to go home to my little dog and my ugly old bathrobe.”
“And Dom.”
“You think you know everything about me,” I said. “You think you know what makes me tick. You are so arrogant.” So much for not arguing.
“Your bathrobe isn’t ugly,” he said. “Well, yeah, it’s ugly, but in a sexy way.”
“Oh, here we go. How on earth could my ratty, worn-out— No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know—”
“You’re incapable of thinking like a guy.” He stopped for a red light and looked at me. “Which is actually kind of charming.”
The light changed and we were off again. Had the big bad black sheep of Clan McAuliffe actually said that something about me was charming? I wouldn’t have thought he knew the word. The air turned crisp and briny as we headed north toward the water.
I couldn’t leave it alone. “So you like me in the ugly bathrobe more than the sexy lingerie from Ramrod News?”
“Why does it have to be one or the other?” He took the turnoff for the town beach. “Variety is good for the soul.”
Not to mention the libido. At this time of night, Martin had his pick of parking spots. He left the car at the edge of the beach and we wordlessly took off across the sand. The moon hung low on the horizon, half-full. Or half-empty, if you prefer. We saw few stars due to light pollution from this built-up area of Long Island, not to mention nearby New York City. The brisk breeze freed strands of hair from my French twist.
I’d left my shoes in the car, and the padre was barefoot too. The beach facing Crystal Harbor—the bay after which the town was named—was studded with rocks and pebbles, which felt cool and invigorating under my feet as we ambled toward the shoreline. North Shore beaches such as this, which are on Long Island Sound across from Connecticut, have little in common with the world-renowned South Shore ocean-facing beaches such as Jones Beach, with their vast stretches of pristine white sand.
Why’s that, you ask? During the last Ice Age, glaciers advanced partway down Long Island, in the process carving out assorted land forms, bays, and waterways on the North Shore and leaving that coastline full of rubble. The South Shore is flatter, with mile after mile of lovely Hamptons-worthy beaches. Maxine hadn’t asked about this during the geography portion of the trivia contest, but if she had, I would have been ready.
I wouldn’t admit it to Martin, but I was glad he’d brought me to the beach. The sights, the smells, the rough sand underfoot—they were simultaneously stimulating and soothing. I had a feeling I’d sleep well that night. “For the record,” I said, “I’m not still hung up on Dom.”
“You’re making progress, I’ll give you that,” he said. “You changed your computer password from your anniversary to Sexy Beast’s birthday.”
I gaped at him. “When are you going to stop messing with my stuff? We had an unspoken pact. I let you live in my house and you leave my things alone.”
“Okay, the thing about unspoken pacts?” he said. “The details can get a bit fuzzy. And for what it’s worth, a pet’s birthday is absolute amateur hour. I reset it with a stronger password this afternoon.”
I stopped walking. “You gave my computer a new password? When were you going to share this with me?”
He shrugged. I forced myself to focus on his face and not on the way the breeze molded his gray T-shirt to his torso. In moonlight no less. “I’m telling you now,” he said. “It’s ‘dollar sign ampersand I wear granny panties twelve twenty-nine.’”
“Not ‘I wear granny panties twenty-four seven’?”
That impish grin. “Do you?”
You’ll never find out. The words were perched on the tip of my tongue, ready to spring, but I restrained myself. After all, who knew? Instead I said, “That’s a stupid password.”
“The Y in ‘granny’ is capitalized, and the number is for December twenty-ninth, my birthday.”
“Right, your birthday.” I shook my head.
“It’s a lot stronger than your pet’s birthday. It’d be tough for a bad guy to guess.”
Good thing I had a bad guy living in my maid’s room to help me figure all this out.
“Dom wants to get married again,” I blurted, and resumed walking.
“I know.” The padre picked up a rock, weighed it in his palm, and hurled it far over the water. “He seems to think it’s a done deal.”
“Huh. Really?”
He shrugged. “It’s no secret you’ve spent the past twenty years waiting for your soul mate to come around.”
“Seventeen years,” I said. “Don’t make me older than I am. And I have not spent...” I sighed. “Okay, but that’s all over, like you said. I’ve moved on. New password, new home, new...”
I hesitated. And no, I wasn’t going to say, “new man.” Shows what you know.
“New, um, friends,” I finished.
“Plus,” he said, “I noticed you moved your Dom shrine to the attic.”
“My what?”
“Your wedding album and that box with all those pictures of him and his erotic love letters and all that. It’s like a little shrine to—”
“You’re not supposed to be upstairs!” I stopped and faced him, flapping my arms in frustration. “You’re definitely not supposed to be snooping in my stuff.”
Martin shoved his hands in his pockets, unfazed. “You’ve made progress, is my point. You used to keep that stuff in your bedroom closet.”
“Only because basements don’t have attics,” I said. The last time he’d gone through my stuff—or the last time I’d known about it—I was living in Mr. Franckowiak’s sad little one-room basement apartment in Sandy Cove. I didn’t waste my breath telling him to respect my privacy. It was a lost cause.
The tide was coming in and cold water surged over my bare feet, getting them moving again. “Does Dom really think it’s inevitable that we’ll get back together?” I asked as we strolled along the wet sand. “What did he say?”
“It’s less what he says and more his general attitude. He’s looking at your house like he’s trying to decide how much of his furniture will fit.”
“He knows I couldn’t move to his place. I can’t move out of my house while Sexy Beast is still alive,” I said, “according to the terms of Irene’s bequest.”
“I know,” the padre said. “Because the house belongs to the dog.”
If he was still bitter about that fact, he concealed it well. I wouldn’t blame him if he was, considering that Irene McAuliffe had broken up his grandparents’ marriage and ended up owning his beloved grandmother’s dream house—which she’d then left to a seven-pound poodle.
I said, “So Dom thinks he’s moving in? For real?”
Martin shrugged. “Yesterday I found him measuring the rooms.”
“Pretty darn confident,” I grumbled.
“A gung-ho business tycoon like him? Can’t expect him to sit around twiddling his thumbs while the woman he wants gets over him and moves on to a more appreciative guy.”
“More appreciative, huh?” Got anyone in mind? A small, round stone winked at me in the moonlight. I bent to pick it up, warmed its burnished perfection in my hand as we walked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Dom pulls out the stops and makes your basic grand gesture.” He illustrated this by making, well, a grand gesture. “Something that’ll knock your socks off. Not to mention your granny panties.”
“That was one day,” I said. “My laundry had piled up.” Jeez, would I ever live those things down?
“So go commando,” he said. “It’s what I do.”
My gaze flicked to the back of his snug jeans.
Oh, please. Don’t tell me that if you heard a guy this hot utter the C-word—in this case, “commando”—you wouldn’t have yourself a little peek.
It was definitely time to change the subject. I said, “Detective Hernandez called Sophie at the bar tonight.”
“Yeah, she looked like someone spat in her beer,” he said. “What did Bonnie want?”
“To interview her again. Interrogate her, whatever. I have a feeling there’s been a new development. Sophie called her lawyer.”
“Smart woman.”
